Only a few hours last night spent on construction, but we got all but one wall sconce wired up. We now have a new switch and current is hot to one whole wall.

I ordered my subwoofers yesterday and the people at the company were amazingly helpful in several emails answering all my questions and beyond. They recommend a subsonic sub sonic filter/phase cancellation device as well, especially if my subs were not going to be side by side, which mine aren’t.

They also recommended a decent 12 gage speaker wire for the subs and said Home Depot carried some great stuff and it wasn’t expensive. When I pre-ran wires way back during framing I must have been in a powered sub mode of thought. Since I’m now using passive subs driven off a dedicated amp I need to run new wire for them.

So off I went to Home Depot to get this good wire. They did indeed have very impressive looking 12 gage wire, but less than 30′. I’d need at least 100’+ to be on the safe side. So I went to Lowes. Nada. Okay, another Home Depot…very little there and one of the employees told me that Home Depot was discontinuing 12 gauge wire since it was a low seller. Now isn’t that great? It’s cheap, $63 for a roll of 250′, but it’s a low seller so drop it. How much can it cost them to just have a roll on hand? Low seller doesn’t mean no seller. So I try RadioShack. No go, they largest they carry is 14 gauge. At this point I’m a bit annoyed with retail America. I remember 12 gauge being readily available 10+ years ago. My only options now are care stereo places, like CCA or home theater stores, but I know I’ll pay a premium for it. But at this point I no longer care about cost, I just want the wire.

I end up at Absolute Theater which is just down the street from me and they do indeed have 12 gauge wire. But of course it’s Monster cable. Oh well, so it costs an arm and a leg I now have some and to avoid this problem in the future I buy 200′ of it. Now I have my own private supply!

The people at Absolute Theater are great. Very friendly and not at all condescending to me or my equipment choices. Audio Encounters makes me feel like I’m some sort of A/V peasant for not having a $35,000 CRT based Projector and $6000 a piece Paradigm speakers. I know my projector isn’t top of the line but the Sharp XV-Z12000 has had killer reviews, many stating that it rivals those high end CRT projectors and at a fraction of the cost, MSRP of $12,000. In any event, after spending $7k on it it’s not a good feeling to have the phrase “at your quality level” used on you in a negative manner. Audio Encounters can be a little too highbrow for my tastes at time.

Since the folks at AT were friendly and since I needed it anyway I went ahead and purchased the Stewart Firehawk Deluxe Screenwall at 100″. It was a bit more than ordering online, but after running all over Columbus in search of wire and encountering friendly people I decided it was worth the extra couple of hundred dollars to support a local company. The bonus to this is that since they are an authorized reseller for Stewart Filmscreens they have the configuration software and were able to print out the installation instructions for me which gives the framing dimensions that I need to build the front wall.